Boy oh boy does this essay take us places. For the record, next week we’re gonna be talking about agriculture for the folks who like more concrete topics.
My lingering position – given albeit limited exposure – regarding the technophiles of the world is that they know next to nothing outside the pixels of their screens. Now, I know, and you know, and we all know that there are some immense polymaths within the computer club. But, in general I throw them all down the same garbage chute in terms of whether they have anything interesting to say.
Correction: It’s not that they do not have anything interesting to say it’s that when they say interesting things they tend to be completely out of their gourds. Therefore, we end up with seemingly intelligent folks out of the Stanford computer science department trying to ‘reinvent’ transportation by buying a bus and calling it disruption. But I digress… If you care to explore the intellectual bubble of the tech world, feel free to read Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking with a hefty grain of salt (he’s a bit too harsh).
However, it can be quite interesting to watch which non-computer science ideas make their way into and out of the techno-universe. For example, last month, the king of venture capital Marc Andreessen started to tweet about the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). He, in turn, decided it would be appropriate to ‘educate’ the rest of us about what the term means via a tweet thread:
Followed by:
Here we have one of the Olympian gods of the ‘new economy’ waxing somewhat philosophically about the state of society. His legions of devoted followers likely think that he is either elevating an obscure topic or is rediscovering a long-lost truth. In reality, the concept is not new, nor is it obscure. In fact, for those outside the land of tech, the idea is relatively straight forward and not at all radical.
The gist of PMC is that rather than the Marxian dichotomy of capital and labor there is a triumvirate of capital, labor, and management. Managers have technical and organizational skills, abilities, and knowledge, while labor has manpower, and capital has – well – capital…
Further on in the thread Andreessen gets around to noting that the term PMC comes from Barbara and John Ehrenreich and that James Burnham laid much of the foundation in his work The Managerial Revolution. There are at least two other points worth mentioning here though.
First of all, there’s Joseph Schumpeter whose 1942 work Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy made the case that, with large distributions of shareholding, managers would be the true ‘owner-operators’ of industry. Why? Because if all persons with capital possess diversified portfolios of ownership stakes, then they will not have the time or desire to intimately know the workings of each company they nominally own. Furthermore, the existence of a broad shareholder class means that individual shares of ownership are meaningless in terms of affecting business practices. Just try walking onto the shop floor at a Ford factory after purchasing a single share.
Labor, in turn, is unable to direct industry because through industrialization their efforts have been – in theory – commoditized and therefore the workers possess limited knowledge of operations capable of granting bargaining power. Now, in my experience the last point is false, but the theory is what it is. Therefore, the managers would be the only ones left to wield industrial control and power.
Secondly, there is a sociological element at play here. We can look at Barbara Ehrenreich’s later work, 1989’s Fear of Falling which explores anxiety within the PMC about downward social mobility. This anxiety threatens the social status of those either born into, or precariously perched within, the PMC. Basically, ain’t nobody looking to be poor, okay? The result is that members of the PMC spend their days rushing around trying to validate and justify their positions within society. This takes on the form of credentialization, bureaucracy, and a general sense of class solidarity.
If you went to Harvard and now only hire Harvard graduates, then we’re talking about you. The same goes for MBAs who only hire other MBAs. This anxiety filled race for validation (a real irony given that it transplants the stereotypical Protestant work ethic with a Catholic valuation of works as a means of justification) serves as the bedrock of recent works such as Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Daniel Markovits’ The Meritocracy Trap.
As a side note you can see a reaction to, and exploration of, Burnham’s original thesis in works such as William Whyte’s The Organization Man and Sloan Wilson’s novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit.
Let me just say that while I can agree with the idea that a PMC exists – and that I am even a part of it. I do not buy into the Andreesson-esque position that everyone in the PMC (or at least the vast majority thereof) are vile monolithic people who hate the working class and unorthodox thinkers. Why? Because folks with a lot of letters after their names tend to be idiots. One should never ascribe to malice what can be just as easily the work of idiocy.
This brings us to the topic at hand here – which is time. It is probably not at all evident how the preceding paragraphs direct us to a discussion of time but stick with me folks.
I don’t care what the physicists say, time is not an objective thing in any meaningful sense from a human perspective. It is a very old argument – Mr Boring-as-shit Aristotle took it as given – to say that time is nothing more than movement. How do you know a day has passed? The sun moved in the sky. A month? The moon moved through its phases. A year? The rotation of the earth’s axis begetting seasons. In the modern world we have not escaped from this simple definition. An atomic clock is nothing more than the sum of movement of the little devil. Yet such a definition ain’t great.
The classic arguments against equating time with movement are Zeno’s paradoxes. To take one as an example you have an arrow flying from point A to point B. It takes a certain amount of time for the arrow to get halfway to B. It then takes an amount of time to get three-quarters of the way to B. Another amount to get five-sixths and so on and so forth. If the amount of distance left to cover is continually being halved by the arrow, and each distance requires some amount of time to cover then you have an infinite number of half-sections requiring an infinite number of time-amounts to get there. Therefore, the arrow should never make it to point B. Except of course that it does. The resulting claim to the paradox is that either motion or time is illusory. The science bros try to wave away the issue by claiming that time and space are not infinitely divisible, but I call shenanigans on that one.
In reality, or at least as I would posit it, time is not equal to motion. Instead, time is something experienced by persons. You can say that I’m barking up the crazy tree because it’s a subjective rather than objective definition. But you tell me, the so-called measurement of time may be objective, but it is divorced from time as experienced by you and me. We have all felt days that seemed to never end and to sense that time has flown by. The moments before an accident time seems to slow. So, who you gonna believe a stopwatch or your lying eyes?
Either way, it doesn’t really matter because we are all persons who at the very least exist within the stream of time [oh, we are feeling all New Age with that sentence]. Time is not something that happens to us but is something that occurs with us as participants or partners. We make plans based on how we understand time. Or rather, we make plans according to our conception of the purpose of time. If you think that time moves towards some point or in a general direction you will live your life differently than if you think it’s cyclical. Put more concretely, if you think we are heading for ecological Armageddon you will behave differently than if you think we’re marching toward a techno-optimistic singularity. Are we following along so far? Alright.
My postulation is that we select our forms of life – the way in which we live – based on how we perceive the trajectory of time. An extreme and moderately well-explored example of this is the Franciscans. If you ever meet a Franciscan in a formal setting, you’ll notice that their name is followed in writing by the postnominals “OFM” standing for (in English anyways) Order of Friars Minor. ‘Minor’ here stands for someone who is below the age of majority. Why? Because the Franciscans choose not to own anything. They use many things, but they do not own property. It was a very fraught theological and ecclesiological debate that settled on regarding them as minors but it’s an ingenious way of ensuring that they lack ownership abilities. In some ways, Franciscans are adults who reverted to a legal childhood. The need for this legal classification is that the entire life structure and understanding of the Franciscans is that they live a life of radical poverty in accordance with their eschatological anticipations. They do not own anything because they believe that to do so is out of step with their understanding of where history is and where it is going. They would say that they live in the current and future apostolic age.
Note: The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben does a great analysis of how this form of life is a radical departure in his work The Highest Poverty. For a more in-depth analysis of time and form of life look at Joseph Ratzinger’s The Theology of History in Saint Bonaventure.
The takeaway here is that if you interpret time or history as moving in a particular manner or with a particular purpose then you will – consciously or unconsciously – shape your life to be in accordance with the movement.
This brings us into contact with the PMC folks. Members of the PMC – again, consciously or unconsciously – believe that the future belongs to so-called knowledge workers. The rationale is that time is moving in an ever-increasingly technical manner towards rationalization. If society is moving in such a direction then it needs managers and professionals who can shepherd it towards its yet unseen destination. Thus, for members of the PMC it is a moral imperative that they run the show because you cannot trust the future to the working class, or even the capitalists who have devoted their lives to consumption rather than production.
Anecdotally, I can tell you from experience that many folks in the PMC feel this imperative. I had the privilege of going to the University of Toronto for grad school and I can tell you that the bulk of the folks at that institution are convinced that it is their God-given right to run the world and make it ‘better’ (whatever the hell that means). Even if we look beyond – shall we say – the top tier institutions or performers we see a conception of history that aligns with the PMC perspective. Why go to college? Because a degree will get you a job which will ensure that you are on the right side of history’s long arc. In short, go to college and you will not be a loser.
The interesting question of our time is what happens when there are not enough positions in the PMC for those who thought they were destined to enter it? In more concrete terms, what happens when a degree – or other credentials – is no longer able to secure a position within the PMC? Especially given that somebody has to do the shitty work.
The short answer is that people get pissed and anxious. The angry folks are just angry. The anxious people run around collecting more and more credentials to stay ahead. It’s the classic ‘I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you’ mentality. This is Markovits’ Meritocracy Trap mentioned above. I have seen – out there in the wild – folks with MBAs refuse to do any ‘grunt’ work solely on the basis that they are above such labors while at the same time having zero job offers indicating otherwise. Additionally, at least 30% of the engineering graduates I know do not work in engineering fields because, frankly, we don’t need that many new engineers every year. They followed the predestined path to success and now work at the Apple Genius Bar.
The flip side is that those who made it to the currently safe shores of the PMC have the tendency of pulling up the ladder behind them. The system worked for them and that’s all that matters. You see this in organizations where the senior leadership has BAs and maybe MBAs from middling schools, but all the junior folks have fourteen letters after their names from Ivy League institutions. How these folks justify their position is by telling themselves that they are just so fucking star-spangled awesome that they deserve what they have. One in a thousand will admit that it was a huge helping of luck that got them to where they are, but that’s rare. I lucked out in that my boss is part of that small cadre. It makes for a more humane approach to business that’s highly effective but that’s a post for another time.
The solution here is that there has got to be a different conception of time for us to take. Otherwise, we are going to be burnt-out, angry, anxious, or just pieces of shit. I don’t know what that conception would look like. That’s for someone a lot smarter than me to come up with, but it’s clear that we need something that can shift expectations about the future and how to get there because right now we are creating more and more people who are over-educated, under-employed, and unsatisfied with how their lives are unfolding. The lack of satisfaction comes from a sense of being left behind in the stream of time. Even those who make it into the ranks of the PMC often come to realize that being a member consists in a long drawn-out grind. This disillusionment, disappointment, or jadedness is more or less the foundation of Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.
To summarize, God bless the techno-nerds for imagining that they are the first to notice the obvious. Mr. Andreessen is right to note that there is a Professional Managerial Class. He is wrong to think that it is a monolithic blob. The shittier members of the PMC (basically the Davos class [but not in a conspiratorial sense here folks]) are that way because they are either delusional about their place in the long arc of history or are made angry via crippling anxiety regarding the prospect of sliding down the social hierarchy. But there are many members of the PMC – I’d like to think myself included here – who acknowledge that they got there through luck sprinkled with a bit of work and are just trying to make the most of it.
This whole situation stems from a notion of time and history that bends towards alleged rationality and the forte of the PMC. If we cannot imagine a different conception of time then we will not be able to come up with a different form of life – or even a rebalancing of valuations regarding different forms. In the meantime, I’ll just continue to do the exact opposite of what the geniuses at McKinsey advise.
End Notes:
Just Finished: How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil
Currently Reading: Feeding the World by Giovanni Federico
Up Next: The European Guilds by Sheilagh Ogilvie